Customer Reviews

New Good Food, rev: Essential Ingredients for Cooking and Eating Well

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Taking a quick flip through this book has one thinking that the volume is encyclopedic and loaded with good information about ingredients. Unfortunately, the depth of information is very shallow and, in some cases, of unclear value.

As background, I have a good sized bookshelf filled with cookbooks and tend to prefer those that discuss authentic ingredients and techniques over the "quick and easy" type. If I'm looking for information on ethnic ingredients, the source should stand up to content in texts like "Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art" (Tsuji), "The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking" (Tropp), or "Classic Indian Cooking" (Sahni).

"New Good Food" often has little more than a paragraph of general information on each ingredient, with the focus seeming to be on why a food store like Whole Foods would select it for its claimed health benefits, rather than providing significant culinary or cultural depth.

There is some substitution information (e.g., sweeteners) and cooking information (e.g., grains and legumes), but its accessibility and depth ("Cut in half or in wedges and steam, or bake with a splash of oil, a favorite seasoning, and salt or tamari.") is not enough to make this book a "go to" for me.

Some of the discussions about what the food terms, such as "organic" and "free range" mean, might be of value to some, but that information is widely available elsewhere.

In some cases, the information is questionable. For example, the section on cooking by color identifies potatoes in the "yellow or orange" group or the "red" group according to their skin color, though the skin is generally not eaten and does not contain the carotenoids at the levels associated with eating "orange" vegetables. It further lists eggplant as a valuable "blue or purple" vegetable, though eggplant has very little value other than a little dietary starch.

"New Good Food" also falls into the trap of "natural is good" on occasion as well. After dismissing all "artificial, nonnutritive sweeteners" (which I generally would agree with), the virtues of Stevia are extolled, because it is a "natural, plant-based substance," even though the "human body can't completely metabolize [Stevia-based sweeteners]." Conium maculatum is a common herb, which produces a "natural, plant-based substance" known as "deadly hemlock." I'm not suggesting that Stevia is poisonous. However, I am aware that it is recommended against for people with liver conditions, probably because of the load its non-nutritive, non-metabolizable chemicals, naturally occurring or not, put on that organ.

With two vegetarians in our family, along with allergy to soy and soy products, I was hoping for a reference on some of the less common ingredients available at market today to complement my current "go to" general reference cookbooks. "New Good Food" isn't about to find a place next to, for example, Cooks Illustrated "The [New] Best Recipe" or many of the excellent CIA series, such as "Techniques of Healthy Cooking, Professional Edition"

I have given up on ever finding a single book which will identify everything I find in the market, tell me how to select, store and use the product, and whether or not its good for me. So I rely on a short shelf of books e.g.Melissa's Great Book of Produce: Everything You Need to Know about Fresh Fruits and Vegetables or Cooking With Asian Leaves by Devagi Sanmugam & Christopher Tan (apparently out of print),Buried Treasures: Tasty Tubers of the World (Brooklyn Botanic Garden All-Region Guide) etc. etc. New Good Food is a good addition to the collection.

It's strong points: the section on beans, peas, and lentils provide specific instructions for a wide variety of beans etc. Rather than guessing what class of beans I have, I more often can find the actual bean variety. It doesn't always help ... I still had to struggle with my mideastern "ful" beans that weren't foul beans (North African flat type) that were foul beans (North Indian brown beans). However, if I restrict my shopping to Whole Foods (where the author works.

There is also a wonderful segment on pasta - Jerusalem artichoke pasta, quinoa pasta, sprouted grain pasta, kuzukiri (Japanese kudzu based).

Like most similar books, one needs to take nutritional information with a dose of skepticism - its a matter of which study producing incompatible results fit the bent of the author. On the whole, however, the author appears to try to be even-handed with regards to most of the locavore / slow foods / organic eating contraversies.

Most grocery stores today offer a lot more choices than they used to. There are so many types of cheeses, there are different types of apples, there are choices from the Asian food section, there are a lot of different pastas. And then what do you do with these foods? How do you store them? I found this book to be an excellent guide as to what unusual looking fruits or vegetables were and how they could be used; how to store cheeses; what vegetables should not be refrigerated. In other words if I want to try a food that I am not familiar with I use this book to help me incorporate it into my menu. I find the information on storage very valuable since I don't seem to have time to shop frequently and like to buy in at least a weekly quantity.

Whether you're looking for information on produce or whole grains, seafood or meats, dairy or sea vegetables, it's in here. I've already done quite a bit of reading in whole foods books, and yet I learned plenty of new and fascinating things in this volume. Much of it is incredibly practical. For example, if you want to know the difference between Tamari, Shoyu, and Soy Sauce---the practical differences in how they're produced and what they contain---that's all in here. You'll understand how to figure out which ones are fermented vs. which ones are produced chemically; which ones are better for high-heat cooking vs. which ones are better as a condiment and why; and so on. If you want to know the complex process by which Tamari was originally produced (as a by-product of miso production), you can read about that, too.

Or maybe you'd like to delve into the wide variety of sea vegetables available in the whole foods market, but you don't know how to even begin using them. Ms. Wittenberg's book identifies each one and provides detailed instructions for using them in various types of cooking.

New Good Food includes plenty of information on various sweeteners---not just how they're made, but what sorts of sugars they're comprised of and how quickly those sugars break down in the body (essential information for diabetics). The section on produce includes information on the peak seasons for a very wide variety of items so you'll know when to go looking for them at their best. Information on whole grains from around the world includes not just historical and nutritional information, but of course basic cooking methods as well.

New Good Food is an utterly fantastic reference volume to keep on your shelves as you experiment with more whole foods.

Wow! So much of what we eat these days in America is barely recognizable as food. This book is true to what it sayds, it's about GOOD FOOD. Great reference tables (for example, cooking grains). Margaret Wittenberg is the Global VP for Quality Standards for Whole Foods Market, and she helped create the National Organic Standards. This lady knows her stuff! I've used this book as a reference tool, a cookbook and even as lite informational reading. If you're a "foodie," this book should definitely be on your kitchen bookshelf.

We have a copy of Margaret Wittenberg's book, New Good Food, and find it to be the book we use most in our kitchen. The reason is simple, it is a book about food, not cooking, about ingredients, not recipes. If you are like us, a complicated recipe misses the point that we are trying to make in our kitchen--we want to eat good ingredients and that means knowing where they come from and where they fit in the larger production/wild harvest picture--and the perfection of a complicated meal is secondary.

Because it is sold in the "cooking" section, some might be disappointed that it does not contain some new recipe for squashblossom cherry-chutney- garlic biscuits. But if you read the full title (ok I owned it before i really figured out what the book was for) you will realize the book explains ingredients, not cooking. Sure it tells you how to cook something, but not to make a complicated meal, instead it tells you what you need to know to shop for, and eat, good food.

If you are interested in organic food and don't want to drive to Joel Salatin's home in Virginia with Michael Pollan just to get a chicken, this book is for you. It respects deeply the values that underpin organic farming and sustainable foods systems, but its really about cooking and eating good ingredients. Nothing over the top like asking the store clerk if the honeybee manure is composted etc. This book is about the future of eating wholesome food--even the top chefs in Paris are starting to offer simpler fare that focuses on the ingredients. In todays crowded and often toxic environment, the best approach is letting the ingredients express themselves rather than make expensive dishes that are best understood by food judges and critics. Don't get me wrong, I love floating island. But we don't approach our meals at home like springboard divers trying to hit a particular degree of difficulty with the higher difficulty always better. Japan now has more top rated restaurants according to Michelin than any other country. That is because Japan has the freshest, best ingredient market in the world. This book helps you pick the best ingredients and cook them well without the back flips. A steamed lentil is a miracle too.

This book will ensure you eat well whether you can cook complicated dishes or not. And it has lots of information about the choices that eating particular foods will have on you, and those that you care about and some that you did not know you should care about, like farm animals.

A recipe focused meal runs in one direction--towards the plate on the table. An ingredients focused meal like Ms. Wittenberg offers, runs in two directions--to the plate and also back to the farm. Get the book, go with her--you won't regret it.

This book is such a great resource. I refer to it often and I recommend it to many of my clients as a necessary tool for navigating the grocery store, especially Whole Foods Market. It is essential for assisting in the developing of one's own personal dietary plan. I use it also as a guide for choosing an assortment of new foods to try.